The Technavance Team

The idea for Technavance began with a familiar research problem - the science was ready, but the tools were not. During her Ph.D. candidacy, Michelle’s advisor needed a lower body negative pressure chamber and was struggling to find a commercial option. The research lab did not have the engineering expertise needed to build one, the university did not have an internal engineering department with relevant physiology expertise to build one, and a custom engineering firm was cost prohibitive. This exposed a critical gap between innovative research questions involving human physiology and the lack of commercially available solutions to investigate them; a significant barrier to moving collective knowledge forward.

In 2019, Michelle and her two sons founded Technavance - the goal was to tackle this barrier by providing researchers with the next generation of engineered solutions. Building on a decades-long history of products being built in-lab by researchers, we paired modern technology and engineering with our understanding of physiology to create next-generation versions of these same products. Since then, by following what our customers have asked us to create, we have expanded the capabilities of these products and engineered new ones.

Fast forward to today – we now have a reliable and cohesive product line as well as considerable experience delivering on custom engineering projects. We continue to improve our current products and design new ones, and our customer base has expanded beyond academic researchers to include emerging biomedical and medical technology companies. We have evolved into a bespoke R&D and low-volume manufacturing partner with global connections. Though our competency and offerings have grown over time, our mission has remained the same: provide solutions to those who have research questions that existing technology just cannot answer yet.